Margaret Gillespie, The Parises of Djuna Barnes The Parises of Djuna Barnes Margaret GILLESPIE - Université de Franche-Comté “Montparnasse has ceased to exist. There's nothing left but a big crowd,” observed the American writer Djuna Barnes in 1931 (Bald, 74). Horror at the gawping droves invading Paris's Left Bank in search of the Lost Generation was a sentiment shared by many of her compatriots such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who two years earlier had noted “something sinister about the crazy boatloads, […] fantastic Neanderthals who believed something, something vague, that you remember from a cheap novel” (Cowley, 240) or Hemingway, for whom frequenting the quarter's Rotonde café, fast becoming a major tourist attraction, was tantamount to going “into the birdhouse at the zoo.” It was a feeling also echoed in Wambly Bald's celebrated Chicago Tribune column. Of Man Ray's former égérie , the model and singer Kiki, Bald wrote, “the focal interest of Montparnasse was becoming unreal. Tourists sitting in her crowd would stare at the lady and play guessing games as to her past” (Bald, 18). Yet if by the end of the twenties, American visitors were coming to Paris in unprecedented numbers — some transatlantic liners holding well over a thousand passengers — the scourge of the uncouth tourist was hardly a new phenomenon. As early as 1869, Mark Twain had satirised the capital's new world sightseers in The Innocents Abroad . Indeed, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw many a renowned American author trying their hand at travel writing, popularizing and mythologizing Paris to an extent hitherto unknown 1, making it already very much of an “unreal city” well before the term was coined in Eliot’s “Wasteland” of 1922. However, it was the publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in 1926 that for many transformed the French capital into the mandatory destination for Americans fleeing America: “the novel served as a guidebook and manual on how to behave like lost-generation expatriates: where to drink, what to drink, how to drink” (Bruccolli, xvi). Both bohemians and their emulators had good reason to leave. Of little use to the expanding American economy and morally suspect, art was relegated to the bottom of the social ladder, together with other leisure activities such as tourism (Rotily, 215) 2. This particular equation may go some way to explaining why artists felt such a need to draw a clear line between the two categories. It was also a time when modernism, of which Paris was arguably the self-appointed fulcrum, was intent on proclaiming its high calling. Art had to be saved at all costs from trivialisation and vulgarizing imitation at the hands of the “Apes of God” as Wyndham Lewis termed them, playing at bohemian existence in the artists' quarters. And yet, just as the modernist aesthetic pilfered from the popular genres it purported to deride — the use of advertising-style slogans by the Vorticist and Futurist movements is a notable example — so were many expatriate writers unable to remain 1 Fenimore Cooper, A Residence in France (1836); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887); William Crary Brownell, French Traits (1889); Richard Harding Davis, About Paris (1895); Theodore Child, The Praise of Paris (1893); Frank Berkley Smith, The Real Latin Quarter (1901). 2 See Barbara Rose: "Comme tout pays neuf, l'Amérique s'était donnée une culture orientée vers le travail bien plus que sur les loisirs. Elle ne possédait pas d'aristocratie; elle ne possédait pas d'amateurs des arts de génération en génération. Peu d'Américains disposaient de temps ou d'argent à consacrer à l'art'. La peinture américaine, 41. Représentations, Hors série 3, novembre 2009 1 Margaret Gillespie, The Parises of Djuna Barnes indifferent to the already-mythologized charms of Paris, to forgo the textual paradigms beloved of low-brow tourist literature or to control the commodification to which they or their works would consequently fall prey. Finally, for the less affluent players, commercial journalism, much of which involved popularizing the artistic community for consumption by a broader public, provided a valuable source of income that would go towards subsidizing more avant-garde projects. Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), who lived and worked in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s and numbered among the hallowed figures of Lost Generation literati stands as a particularly salient case in point. For the touring cognoscenti of the twenties, the sophisticated Barnes numbered among the figures who authenticated Left-Bank topography. In the following passage for example Harold Loeb, founder and editor of Broom magazine, describes his arrival in France with fellow passengers the poet Alfred Kreymbourg and his wife. Just as the country itself gratifyingly lives up to the expectations of the metonymical travel narrative, so Barnes herself is evoked as a prototype of the modern and the bohemian: The SS Rotterdam dropped us off at Cherbourg. The Kreymbourgs were delighted at being in France, and thrilled to discover that French workmen actually wore blue pants and French houses had blue shutters. We reached Paris at dusk. The four of us crowded into a taxi and headed for the Hotel Jacob on the Left Bank. […] Djuna Barnes was staying there […] Sherwood Anderson had just left for England, and Man Ray was expected any day. (Loeb, 12) Famed for her acerbic wit and stunning looks, she was not only “considered to be the most important woman writer of the Paris community” (Benstock, 236), but arm in arm with her sculptress lover, Thelma Wood, cut a dashingly unconventional figure on the capital's boulevards — a winning combination of talent and bravado which led her to be deemed “an ultimate reflection of the times” (O'Neal, 106). But if Barnes the “legendary personality” 3 (Hemingway's term) embodied the outré audacity of inter-war Paris and made her way more or less surreptitiously into many an expatriate mémoir or novel — Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company , Paul Bowles' Without Stopping , The Sun Also Rises and Finnegans Wake to name but a few — it also added symbolic capital to the writer’s own journalistic output (Elliott & Wallace, 122-140). A regular contributor to McCalls's , Vanity Fair , and Vogue , but also a serious experimental poet and novelist, her work, much of which takes the City of Lights as its setting or inspiration, has always resisted clear-cut categorisation. One of the most striking ways in which such hermeneutic ambiguity is to be felt is precisely in her various readings of, and writings on Paris — a city, she once complained, that had been too much reported and, in a phrase that would seem to anticipate Walter Benjamin's work on the ills of mechanical reproduction, whose “multiplication had been its destruction” (Barnes, 1974, 19). Whilst Barnes's magazine pieces fed into, and indeed contributed to, mythologizing the conventionalized compositions of expatriate lore (“James Joyce” [1922], "The Models Have Come to Town" [1924]) and Gallic sophistication (“Nothing Amuses Coco Chanel After Midnight” [1931]), they simultaneously questioned and undercut such hackneyed constructions. 3 Cf. Philip Herring, Djuna, the Life and Work of Djuna Barnes , New York : Penguin, 1995, p. 134. In an editorial column in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic (April 1924), Hemingway referred to “that legendary personality that has dominated the intellectual night-life of Europe for a century is in town. I have never met her, nor read her books, but she looks very nice”. Représentations, Hors série 3, novembre 2009 2 Margaret Gillespie, The Parises of Djuna Barnes “Vagaries Malicieux,” first published in Double Dealer in 1922, treads just such a generically equivocal line, right from the “mischievous caprice” of its bilingual title. Posturing as an embellished autobiographical voyage of discovery, though classed as fiction when re-published in 1974, the tone of the first-person narrative, wavering as it does between world-weary ennui, awestruck candour, and outré allusion generates a text which, written against the grain of the hackneyed travelogue, discursively enacts the very impossibility of capturing Paris's elusive essence. Seen through Barnes's sophisticated eye, the French capital becomes the chimerical sum of its contradictory textual representations — or as the narrative’s opening gambit puts it, “for years one has dreamed of Paris, just why, no man can tell!” (Barnes, 1974, 5) “Vagaries Malicieux” continues with a series of reflections on the edifying value of Parisian sightseeing, but tuned just a little too high to be credible: No one dares have a fixed opinion on life, love or literature until he has been to Paris, for there is always someone at his elbow to hiss, 'Have you visited the Louvre? Have you reacted to Giotto? Have you run your hand over the furniture of the fifteenth century? Seen the spot where Marie Antoinette became most haughty? No? Well then, my dear friend, keep in your place’ (Barnes, 1974, 5) The voyage embarked upon, the tone plummets swiftly into bathos, as a first illusion — the glamour of travel — is shattered by the mundane and impecunious reality of the other, far from illustrious passengers: “It was a one-class boat […]. The cargo was chiefly disappointed teachers from the Middle West who sat on deck eating gift fruit sarcastically” (5). Disillusion persists on arrival in France, which initially appears less one of the great cultural hubs of Europe than a very poor imitation of America: Le Havre lay before us. Two little French children stood at the extreme end of the jutting point of land, and called out to the pilot boat, which was just pushing off. Behind them a blank wall reared up and an enormous but shabby sign announced some inferior make of French soap […].